That's because we're so bloody used to it from our own government. Cameras going up everywhere, constant attempts to introduce an ID card scheme, fingerprints and DNA samples held of people questioned and released without charge, airport passenger information forwarded to US authorities, numberplate recognition cameras on all the motorways, plans to satellite track cars for the road tax... The list is vast. I often wonder if there's some sort of competition between the Bush administration and Tony Blair to see who can come up with the most outrageous destruction of their citizens liberty and privacy, and get away with it.
Believe me, I'm a brit, and I'm horrified by this. I just moved next door to Yeovil, and there's no WAY I'm going for a drink and/or meal there if it means I have to be fingerprinted first. The idea is offensive. This private company holding my fingerprints and personal details, who knows who has access to that data. No. Way. I fully intend to let my next-door council know this, that they've lost my custom in all possible ways. By snail mail.
What happens when it goes national? I'll stop going to the pub for a quiet drink, which will also probably mean giving up half my friends. A good chat over a pint is a British institution, but I'm going to have to give up my fingerprints and ID to do it? Goodbye to the pub then. No doubt it's lowered drink-related crime, they've all moved to pubs in the rest of the area - or worse, drink at home and beat up their families. They did say domestic violence had risen, so they've displaced rowdy drinkers who could be arrested and stopped in public, to domestic violence at home, where there's no witnesses and no cops on speed-dial. That's so much better.
Some of the national press reported on this when it was a dinky little scheme in a provincial town far away from anywhere. I wonder what the Daily Mail and The Sun will make of this now it's going national? Getting fingerprinted to have a pint? This will hopefully be as popular as road tax and ID cards, i.e. vehemently opposed by many.
God forbid that we hold people accountable for their actions while intoxicated. We simply cannot be so rough and judgemental as to do that! Why they're just a good person who did something stupid while drunk!
This isn't about holding people accountable for their actions. There's already pub-watch for damage and the police for assaults. This is about mandatory fingerprinting every patron at the entrance and tieing it to their personal details, regardless of their guilt or innocence. I'm not happy about the police fingerprinting people who aren't even charged with an offence, I'm certainly not happy about being fingerprinted just to go for a goddamn drink, especially when it's primary purpose is to protect landlords property from minor vandalism. It's a massively disproprotionate invasion of innocent drinkers privacy to help them ID the few troublemakers more easily.
I will be voting with my feet and avoiding drinking Yeovil, even though I live right next door. What do I do when it goes national, and ALL the pubs have it? Choose between giving up my fingerprints to a private security company with a national system (and no idea of who has access to the data), and stopping going out to my local for a quiet drink once in a while? My family celebrated my Dad's birthday over a great pub meal locally. We had a few bottles of wine - does that mean my entire family should be fingerprinted before we're allowed in in future?
This is an outrageous invasion of privacy, and I for one will not submit to it.
Here's the story from when Yeovil first started the scheme in May, with other places showing an interest if it succeeded. It's been claimed it has, so it's no surprise it may go national under *this* ID-card loving, camera installin' , secret-shipper-of-US-terror-suspects, privacy invadin' government.
Of course, the fact that different telephony standards have evolved in the world in different ways long before the ITU became involved couldn't possibly account for regional differences. And that the UN has very little power to compel business or governments to completely alter their phone systems wouldn't limit their ability to change things inside the national countries. So you want the ITU and UN to have lots more power over national governments to allow them to fix these problems.
Just as frankly, you are a fool, if you are afraid of US more than you are of UN...
Guess not.
Really? I guess, you have not heard of things like "mad cow", "bird flu", and "polio comeback", have you?
mad cow comes from feeding dead animals back to herbivores as a cheap source of protein. Nope, corporate farming wasn't responsible for that, it was the WHO! Bird flu. Hmm, a diseas spread by migratory birds, that's heavily investigated and local governments assisted by the WHO to try and prevent spreading further. Gotta hate that UN. Polio is coming back in the poor areas because governments aren't vaccinating, despite help to do so from the WHO. Yes, that's the UN's fault.
On the other hand we have a country that's invaded two countries recently, one on a very limited pretext, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and is sitting on the most expensive military in the world, with many many nuclear weapons, has an electoral system that's a joke throughout the world, and has courts that don't seem to care that the defendant is from another country. Yeah, the UN is far more scary than that. Thanks for the gratuitous insult by the way, that REALLY sells your argument.
Don't buy the legal fiction. Unless you're unfortunate to live in one of the few US states that implemented UCITA, EULA's are not a legally binding contract. Well, they're definitely not in my jurisidiction. Doctrine of first sales says that after sale, the copyright holder can apply no more restrictions than copyright law itself allows. This has been upheld many, many times.
Obviously a legally binding contract which is signed and filed before purchase - such as the one businesses agree to for volume licences - will be binding and apply to the use of the software. A home user going into a shop and buying a computer or a box with a piece of software on it? Once money is exchanged, that's the sale, and no additional conditions can be applied from that point on, with one exception - ongoing agreements. Microsft can apply a EULA to windows update, microsoft live, or msn messenger, as you must agree to the terms to gain access to their services, but my personal computer hard-drive? They have no jurisdiction, because making copies into the memory and hard-drive for the purpose of operation are specifically allowed in my country under copyright law - I don't need permission from microsoft to use the software, so they have no way to apply the EULA. Plus, the method of applying the EULA is most defnitely not one that forms a binding contract, it is merely a contract of adhesion and unenforceable.
Easy. No one country should hold domain. It can still physically reside in the US, but make it part of the UN. And before you scoff, the ITU and WHO are both UN organisations, and I don't hear too many complaints about the UN regulation of the international phone system or their handling of international disease prevention.
Frankly, I'm much more scared about censorship of non-US based websites due to political and/or judicial pressure from the US on ICANN and its US-based registrars* than I am of some coalition in the UN getting a resolution passed to censor the 'net. Spamhaus is just one example of what I've been expecting ever since the blocking of XXX domains by the US government, and the way verisign has run the.com domain system like it's own fiefdom.
*speaking of which, why is.com still treated as US property subject to US courts? If we're going to treat.com domains as 'property' based on trademarks, then it should be legally bound to the base of the company that owns it, not the company that just provides the DNS entries..com domains are international global domains for world commerce. If it was.co.us, I'd bow to US jurisidiction, but spamhaus are a UK company with no US holdings. The only reason this US court has any power at all is because the US government refuses to do the right thing and convert a world network into a world system, instead of a US owned system that the rest of us are only 'allowed' to play on at the US government and courts whim.
You can activate over the phone, and download and install updates manually via sneaker net from an internet enabled computer. what you won't be able to do is download optional updates and utilities - not a direct problem, since you can't download anyway. There will be some updates, like IE7, that do a WGA check at install, not just download, and there you're stuffed. Generally though, lack of an internet connection won't stop you updating your offline box, though a dodgy key or WGA failure will still cause you to have to sit through nagging popups and pauses at boot.
As I understand it though, Vista *will* require an internet connection.
Chances are, it'll be spent by the training company to expand their business, and for them to do new things.
Aha, but that's the broken windows fallacy again:) If company A pays company B for vista training, then that's all they have. If they hadn't had to pay for that vista training - because windows xp wasn't going to dropped like a hot potato - then they could have paid for training for an actual useful new skill. Either way, the training company gets paid, but company A gets something useful out of it too.
Admittedly, I'm assuming that vista will result in zero or negative extra productivity over existing systems, but given what I've seen in the RC so far, and that security holes still seem to be rampant on vista, it doesn't much of a stretch. I know that personally my productivity at work will drop for a time while I figure out how to fix new vista laptops for staff.
Oh, and fair point about MS europe, though a small percentage of the money wasted going to Gordon Brown just sounds like extra waste;)
Obviously money has to change hands somewhere, but its the details that are important.
For starters, money spent on licenses doesn't stay in the EU; it goes back to the US. If it stayed locally, as it often does with smaller EU software shops, then it gets spent on salaries, growing the business etc and gets invested back into the local economy. Money going back to Microsoft US is basically money down the drain from the point of view of Europe.
Similarly, replacing currently working computers with more powerful ones, purely to run vista - and with all the extra power being sucked up with the pretty effects - is the broken windows fallacy; i.e. money spent on new computers purely to run vista, with no other advantage is money that could have been spent on other areas instead. Also, most of the PC makers are not european, so the bulk of the money again goes out to the benefit of US and asian businesses, to the cost of europeans.
Finally, retraining and hiring lots of people to manage, maintain and use windows vista and office 12 (or whatever version it'll be) is only a benefit if they end up more productive at the end of it; if they are about as productive as they were on the old software, then the training costs are wasted money caused by being stuck on the windows treadmill. That money will go back into the local economy at least, but it could have been more productively spent on hiring people to expand the business and do new things, rather than just maintain the more complex infrastructure that nobody understands properly.
As the article says, european companies could quite happily spend the 40 billion on other things to grow their business, instead of spending it purely to stand still and get back to where they were but with slightly prettier graphics - something not particularly useful to business workers. If vista brings massive productivity benefits to people upgrading, fair enough - but that's not the reason they're talking about $40b, that's the money european businesses will need to spend (largely overseas) to get through it in one piece. Not a hugely compelling reason to upgrade, in my view.
I'd been using linux for several years before gentoo (caldera, redhat, mandrake), and I'd always dual-booted to windows with it - I just couldn't quite stick to linux as my primary desktop.
Gentoo changed that. I learned a lot about how to fix a system from gentoo. For a start, I learned about using a live-cd to chroot into a faulty install, and how to fix it - something I didn't realise you could do, with binary distros I just always gave up and reinstalled. I compiled my first kernel for gentoo, and realised it really isn't that scary - and you can really trim it down in size if you can read lspci. Above all, I learned not to be scared of the command line, where to look for help, and that it's much quicker and nicer to fix a problem than the windows-learned habit of reinstalling at the first non-trivial problem. The binary distros don't really expose you to the underbelly of the OS, it's all point-and-click GUI cleanness. Creating your own RPMs is a giant pain in the ass. Updating an ebuild for a version bump that isn't in the portage tree yet? Damn easy. Gentoo is definitely a good system to learn more about linux on, simply because you have to in order to install the thing. I introduced my fellow admin at work to linux through gentoo, on the basis he'd learn more about the underlying concepts of linux in 6 months of gentoo than several years of a windows-clone distro like ubuntu. Now he's running a mixture of SuSE and gentoo (we're both kde fans) pretty much unaided, and he's pretty happy maintaining the linux servers too.
The biggest mistake the article author made was giving up on the install at problems, and starting again from scratch. If he'd just left the machine compiling for long enough (how slow was his CPU anyway? I've had boxes fully compiled and running in a few hours), or kept at the GRP stage, he wouldn't have wasted so much time repeating himself.
My boxes at home are one gentoo server/desktop that's on 24/7 - even my other-half uses firefox on it; and one windows gaming pc that seems to break every third reboot, which is why I only turn it for a little gaming (company of heroes atm) every few days.
Nowadays, my linux boxes at work run a mixture of SuSE OSS and gentoo; SuSE for boxes that do basic file-serving/routing that I don't need to mess with, and gentoo for the systems that are doing clever or complex jobs like the smtp filtering gateway, because they're much easier to tweak 'just-so'.
Well yes, that's rather the point of taxation; money from everyone spent on the common good - at least in theory. Since not everyone wants to pay, you could spin it as being taken by force, but that's also slightly misleading, as most people accept the social contract and feel that a police service, roads, schools, hospitals etc are worth clubbing together to pay for - even allowing that some will get more than others, and some will not use a particular service at all.
Do you also feel that insurance is robbery, that paying in advance for a service you might not need is a waste of money? Government taxation is a form of compulsorary insurance.
As they touch on in the article, as more and more money is spent in the healthcare sector, the cost of insurance will continue to rise, and thus put even greater stress on what little social healthcare provision there is. As the people working in healthcare rises, the salary bill rises, and somebody has to pay it; and it'll either be government funding (research funding etc) and higher charges for the users.
Speaking as a non-american, it's already one of the great ironies of the 'great american economy' - increasing numbers of people will end up working in the healthcare industry, but won't be able to afford to use it for themselves or their families. Yet giving everyone affordable access to healthcare, increasing productivity, is decried as socialist, while letting people be crippled by the financial burden of a major illness is true-blue American. Lovely.
"Shunning" is such a silly word to use for this. Just because the iTunes store has not entirely replaced the CD in its few years of existence does not mean that users are shunning it.
Oh but it does. Digital downloads is such an improvement on CDs - or rather, it should be. It allows retailers to stock a much bigger range of music for little extra cost compared to warehouse scaling. That vast choice can then be offered to the customer. It allows a wide range of bitrates and codecs for little to no extra cost, so the customer can choose whether they want a low-rate mp3 for the mobile phone, a flac or dvd-audio for their monster home audio setup, or something in between. Ideally, what you pay is based on bandwidth used, so it's cheaper to download the lower-res files if you're on a tight budget.
Users can choose which tracks they want from which album - no longer do customers have to pay for half a dozen tracks they don't like - they can spend the money they save on more tracks they do like. Better musicians do better, poorer musicians relying on a one-track wonder won't, so the overall quality of music available will improve - but since it's digital distribution, even rubbish tracks will still sell a few, probably in 10 years time as 'nostalgia' pieces - and it doesn't matter, as server storage is cheap.
Digital distribution is much cheaper than physical distribution, so the cost of music can fall substantially with the artist still getting the same cut. Even better, the artists can distribute tracks themselves directly to the digital music stores, and cut out the middle man, thus getting a much bigger cut while the customer still gets cheaper music.
Digital distribution is also so cheap, it's not worth messing about with P2P for most people, so there's no DRM. DRM only means that paying users get a worse experience than illegal copiers anyway (as all DRM can be cracked easily), thus driving them to the P2P sites. DRM is thus actually counter-productive, as it harms the user experience of using the store - and one of the biggest advantages of digital distribution is that you can buy the track you want immediately, and not mess about driving to the shops or ordering from a giant warehouse, so ease of use is everything.
So - digital distribution is cheaper, more convenient, gives more money to the artist, has a much bigger range of tracks and choice in format. Its artifical restriction free, it plays on any device you like, you can redownload tracks you've already paid for and is much faster than any physical retailer.
I'm just waiting for the music industry and their supportive computing industry to actually DO this, rather than artificially hold back digital online stores to be worse than buying crappy plastic discs from a warehouse in surrey. People are shunning the digital stores because they're rubbish, not because CDs are inherently better than digital distribution.
I live near bournemouth (used to live there too, but shifted west a bit), and the thing that's annoyed people is the complete lack of information about the chips and the poor info about the new recycling scheme. Basically, they've been worried that the council is about to start spying on the amount of their rubbish disposal and charging an extra 'waste' tax based on how much they throw away. Given the the council tax is already supposed to pay for waste disposal, it's a bit cheeky to start charging extra, and people aren't happy to be secretly monitored by the council either.
Also, what about people throwing stuff in your bin? I live near a local market, and my non-wheelie bin constantly gets extra rubbish from people at the market. It's annoying bagging it up, it would be very very annoying if I was to be charged by weight for it to boot.
Personally, I wouldn't complain about the media too much - at least they're getting people involved in what their local council is up to, and if people get sufficiently up in arms over this, the council might be a bit more careful next time they decide to spend large sums of money secretly monitoring their residents.
These problems are the same as any small business has getting off the ground. How do I get new customers when they could just go to the big chains they already know?
The answers are the same. You take out loans to pay for marketing, promotions (giving stuff away free), and then pay them off when you're established and making a profit. You might even have to work two jobs to support yourself while you follow your dream and get established. Not everybody makes it. Either they have a product that not enough people want, or people didn't find out about it, and they go under. That's the free market.
It's very little different to how artists work today. Unknown artists struggle to get exposure, so do bread-and-butter work and 2nd jobs to get by. Giving away some of your work for free, especially digitally where it costs you virtually nothing, is great marketing. The 'tip-jar' method does work sometimes, as does getting people to pay for higher quality versions of your material. Give away the low-res one, maybe with adverts embedded (hellooooo, radio) and use that to get people to pay for the high-res version. After a few cycles of that, people will pay in advance for the new one to get it made, or released if already made.
The old method of charging many times what something cost to produce is dying. The whole point of the free market is for new businesses and new business methods to be tried out, and live or die in the attempt. DRM is the complete antithesis of the free market as it uses government law to prop up an artificial and failing business model, and removes the freedom of the customer to choose alternative providers. DRM on physical products warps the meaning of physical property itself for the purposes of the big media cartels.
My singlle player version of Half-life 2 DVD is a great example of the evils of DRM on physical media. It's encrypted, so I can't use it without Valve unlocking it for me online. I can't resell it, as my key is now used. I can't even give it away, as the key is tied to my steam account which has other older versions of my games in, and I can't delete the key or move it. The physical DVD in my hand might as well be a blank piece of plastic with a number printed on it, and to add insult to injury, when the game was first released I had to put my DVD in the drive for the DRM check, while people who'd bought it online didn't. It's over a year later, and I'm still pissed at Valve.
Those statistics are for the bbc homepage only, for one week in september 2005. He even states that he expects an above average number of people visiting the front page are newer-to-the-internet users (because they haven't bookmarked the inside section they want yet), and those on corporate systems as the bbc is deemed 'safe' to visit from work. This is based on their user profiling in the past.
Both of those would depress the number of alternative OS and browser users. You also have to factor in the number of linux users that have already altered their Useragent string to windows+IE in order to bypass moronic page restrictions like the NYT. Windows+IE native users of course, have very little need to alter theirs.
Finally, that was a year ago. Vista still isn't out, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if both the numbers for OSX and linux were up, and of course firefox adoption - especially given an increasing number of corporates are adopting it for security. Certainly, the broad sweep of those figures is reasonable (I wouldn't expect linux use to be above 2% in those circumstances) but I wouldn't count on them as completely gospel of the current OS and browser useage for general users.
They are addressing the issue of power draw; take the nvidia 7600gt/gs, it doesn't even need a separate molex connector, it gets all its power from the pci-e bus. The thing about feature sets is, you want one thing (a low wattage card, with less cutting edge performance) and _I_ want a card that pushes polygons as fast as possible, and hang the power-use; that's why there is more than one card in a range.
Also, as new chips come out, the old ones are retired, but not immediately. So the question often is do I want the cheap end of the new range, or the expensive end of the old range, thus leading to more choice/confusion (the expensive end of the new chipsets is just silly money). There's no way out of that short of killing supply of the old cards immediately, which is quite annoying if you were planning on getting one when they got older and cheaper as part of an SLI/crossfire setup.
Oh, and btw - do you still have a 5 1/4" floppy disc and a VLB slot? Technology moves on. AGP simply doesn't have enough bandwidth for the newer GPU's. PCI-E is SO much more flexible and has a lot of headroom. I'd advise doing the whole upgrade in one go though; DDR2, PCI-E and M2 or conroe-compatible 775. If you're happy with your current performance on your current hardware, fair enough, but try playing games like oblivion, FEAR, or upcoming games like UT2007. Still, the longer you can bear it, the more you'll get for your money when you do finally bite the bullet.
The nv drivers are the open-source reverse engineered ones that come with Xorg. They don't have access to most of the specs of the cards, and have to do 3D in software. Basically, they're bearable for 2D work, but since Nvidia don't disclose most of the info needed to write proper drivers (NDA's and all that) the only choice for high-speed use is still the binary closed source nvidia driver.
There are questions over whether the GPL prevents the distribution of the closed-source binary driver precompiled for use with a particular distro's kernel; which is why most distro's have now switched to the GPL Xorg nv driver by default, and let you 'taint' the kernel with the binary driver yourself if you wish, which is definitely legal. For the ramifications of this sorry state of affairs - where convenience butts heads with principles - see what happened to koraa
The real answer is to buy music from independants, music on labels that aren't part of the RIAA, and don't condone the mafia-like tactics of the major labels.
If artists can see that selling music through places like cdbaby is a route for success and profit, rather than signing a devil's contract with a major - then the supply of new artists ready to be screwed by the majors will dry up. That will, in turn, hurt the majors which might just start to adjust their instructions to the RIAA lawyers - or at best, they'll go out of business.
Don't stop buying music. Just stop buying music from the labels determined to destroy fair use and keep price-fixing. Artists will get the message eventually if we, their customers, give them a good alternative.
Yes, but it's almost entirely a few American spammers sending spam advertising crap products to Americans, priced in dollars and shipping in the US. The rest is made up of nigerian scammers and phishers, but those are already illegal under fraud laws.
The mail might route via asian open hosts, but the problem is largely American. Anything that affects US spammers would have a huge impact on world spam. Mind you, the Russians are getting in on the act, so they'll need to tackled head on as well in an ideal world.
I agree with you about the 'last host' problem though, the ISPs would end up carrying the bulk of the costs. Still, might shut down pink ticket ISP's for good, as they'd have to levy the fine upwards on their customers. Still, it smacks of breaching common carrier, which is tricky.
Better to just fine the seller of the goods. After all, they have a website, it's linked in the email, and it's selling a product (porn, drugs etc etc) in a manner against the law.
What licence? They sold me the software via a reseller, with no requirement to read, agree, or sign anything from microsoft prior to the purchase.
Once the product is delivered, there are nice pretty stickers saying I have to agree to a licence before I use the product. But what licence? It's my box, my CD, and my copy of Windows. First Sale doctrine says that once they've sold me a copy of a copyrighted work, that copy is mine and they cannot use copyright law to apply any further terms to my use of said copy POST SALE. That sticker is now my sticker, my receipt says so, so they can stuff their OEM terms wherever they like.
You could argue that I need to agree to the licence in order to use windows update and activation, (i.e. an ongoing relationship), but I don't recall any notice to that effect when you activate. Nor should an artificial technical restriction to get round first sale doctrine stand up well in court.
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That's because we're so bloody used to it from our own government. Cameras going up everywhere, constant attempts to introduce an ID card scheme, fingerprints and DNA samples held of people questioned and released without charge, airport passenger information forwarded to US authorities, numberplate recognition cameras on all the motorways, plans to satellite track cars for the road tax... The list is vast. I often wonder if there's some sort of competition between the Bush administration and Tony Blair to see who can come up with the most outrageous destruction of their citizens liberty and privacy, and get away with it.
Believe me, I'm a brit, and I'm horrified by this. I just moved next door to Yeovil, and there's no WAY I'm going for a drink and/or meal there if it means I have to be fingerprinted first. The idea is offensive. This private company holding my fingerprints and personal details, who knows who has access to that data. No. Way. I fully intend to let my next-door council know this, that they've lost my custom in all possible ways. By snail mail.
What happens when it goes national? I'll stop going to the pub for a quiet drink, which will also probably mean giving up half my friends. A good chat over a pint is a British institution, but I'm going to have to give up my fingerprints and ID to do it? Goodbye to the pub then. No doubt it's lowered drink-related crime, they've all moved to pubs in the rest of the area - or worse, drink at home and beat up their families. They did say domestic violence had risen, so they've displaced rowdy drinkers who could be arrested and stopped in public, to domestic violence at home, where there's no witnesses and no cops on speed-dial. That's so much better.
Some of the national press reported on this when it was a dinky little scheme in a provincial town far away from anywhere. I wonder what the Daily Mail and The Sun will make of this now it's going national? Getting fingerprinted to have a pint? This will hopefully be as popular as road tax and ID cards, i.e. vehemently opposed by many.
God forbid that we hold people accountable for their actions while intoxicated. We simply cannot be so rough and judgemental as to do that! Why they're just a good person who did something stupid while drunk!
This isn't about holding people accountable for their actions. There's already pub-watch for damage and the police for assaults. This is about mandatory fingerprinting every patron at the entrance and tieing it to their personal details, regardless of their guilt or innocence. I'm not happy about the police fingerprinting people who aren't even charged with an offence, I'm certainly not happy about being fingerprinted just to go for a goddamn drink, especially when it's primary purpose is to protect landlords property from minor vandalism. It's a massively disproprotionate invasion of innocent drinkers privacy to help them ID the few troublemakers more easily.
I will be voting with my feet and avoiding drinking Yeovil, even though I live right next door. What do I do when it goes national, and ALL the pubs have it? Choose between giving up my fingerprints to a private security company with a national system (and no idea of who has access to the data), and stopping going out to my local for a quiet drink once in a while? My family celebrated my Dad's birthday over a great pub meal locally. We had a few bottles of wine - does that mean my entire family should be fingerprinted before we're allowed in in future?
This is an outrageous invasion of privacy, and I for one will not submit to it.
Here's the story from when Yeovil first started the scheme in May, with other places showing an interest if it succeeded. It's been claimed it has, so it's no surprise it may go national under *this* ID-card loving, camera installin' , secret-shipper-of-US-terror-suspects, privacy invadin' government.
Of course, the fact that different telephony standards have evolved in the world in different ways long before the ITU became involved couldn't possibly account for regional differences. And that the UN has very little power to compel business or governments to completely alter their phone systems wouldn't limit their ability to change things inside the national countries. So you want the ITU and UN to have lots more power over national governments to allow them to fix these problems.
Just as frankly, you are a fool, if you are afraid of US more than you are of UN...
Guess not.
Really? I guess, you have not heard of things like "mad cow", "bird flu", and "polio comeback", have you?
mad cow comes from feeding dead animals back to herbivores as a cheap source of protein. Nope, corporate farming wasn't responsible for that, it was the WHO! Bird flu. Hmm, a diseas spread by migratory birds, that's heavily investigated and local governments assisted by the WHO to try and prevent spreading further. Gotta hate that UN. Polio is coming back in the poor areas because governments aren't vaccinating, despite help to do so from the WHO. Yes, that's the UN's fault.
On the other hand we have a country that's invaded two countries recently, one on a very limited pretext, killing tens of thousands of civilians, and is sitting on the most expensive military in the world, with many many nuclear weapons, has an electoral system that's a joke throughout the world, and has courts that don't seem to care that the defendant is from another country. Yeah, the UN is far more scary than that. Thanks for the gratuitous insult by the way, that REALLY sells your argument.
Don't buy the legal fiction. Unless you're unfortunate to live in one of the few US states that implemented UCITA, EULA's are not a legally binding contract. Well, they're definitely not in my jurisidiction. Doctrine of first sales says that after sale, the copyright holder can apply no more restrictions than copyright law itself allows. This has been upheld many, many times.
Obviously a legally binding contract which is signed and filed before purchase - such as the one businesses agree to for volume licences - will be binding and apply to the use of the software. A home user going into a shop and buying a computer or a box with a piece of software on it? Once money is exchanged, that's the sale, and no additional conditions can be applied from that point on, with one exception - ongoing agreements. Microsft can apply a EULA to windows update, microsoft live, or msn messenger, as you must agree to the terms to gain access to their services, but my personal computer hard-drive? They have no jurisdiction, because making copies into the memory and hard-drive for the purpose of operation are specifically allowed in my country under copyright law - I don't need permission from microsoft to use the software, so they have no way to apply the EULA. Plus, the method of applying the EULA is most defnitely not one that forms a binding contract, it is merely a contract of adhesion and unenforceable.
Easy. No one country should hold domain. It can still physically reside in the US, but make it part of the UN. And before you scoff, the ITU and WHO are both UN organisations, and I don't hear too many complaints about the UN regulation of the international phone system or their handling of international disease prevention.
.com domain system like it's own fiefdom.
.com still treated as US property subject to US courts? If we're going to treat .com domains as 'property' based on trademarks, then it should be legally bound to the base of the company that owns it, not the company that just provides the DNS entries. .com domains are international global domains for world commerce. If it was .co.us, I'd bow to US jurisidiction, but spamhaus are a UK company with no US holdings. The only reason this US court has any power at all is because the US government refuses to do the right thing and convert a world network into a world system, instead of a US owned system that the rest of us are only 'allowed' to play on at the US government and courts whim.
Frankly, I'm much more scared about censorship of non-US based websites due to political and/or judicial pressure from the US on ICANN and its US-based registrars* than I am of some coalition in the UN getting a resolution passed to censor the 'net. Spamhaus is just one example of what I've been expecting ever since the blocking of XXX domains by the US government, and the way verisign has run the
*speaking of which, why is
You can activate over the phone, and download and install updates manually via sneaker net from an internet enabled computer. what you won't be able to do is download optional updates and utilities - not a direct problem, since you can't download anyway. There will be some updates, like IE7, that do a WGA check at install, not just download, and there you're stuffed. Generally though, lack of an internet connection won't stop you updating your offline box, though a dodgy key or WGA failure will still cause you to have to sit through nagging popups and pauses at boot.
As I understand it though, Vista *will* require an internet connection.
What should we do?
It's simple: Shut down the internet.
You bastard, you're the one that's been giving ideas to my senior management!
Chances are, it'll be spent by the training company to expand their business, and for them to do new things.
:) If company A pays company B for vista training, then that's all they have. If they hadn't had to pay for that vista training - because windows xp wasn't going to dropped like a hot potato - then they could have paid for training for an actual useful new skill. Either way, the training company gets paid, but company A gets something useful out of it too.
;)
Aha, but that's the broken windows fallacy again
Admittedly, I'm assuming that vista will result in zero or negative extra productivity over existing systems, but given what I've seen in the RC so far, and that security holes still seem to be rampant on vista, it doesn't much of a stretch. I know that personally my productivity at work will drop for a time while I figure out how to fix new vista laptops for staff.
Oh, and fair point about MS europe, though a small percentage of the money wasted going to Gordon Brown just sounds like extra waste
Obviously money has to change hands somewhere, but its the details that are important.
For starters, money spent on licenses doesn't stay in the EU; it goes back to the US. If it stayed locally, as it often does with smaller EU software shops, then it gets spent on salaries, growing the business etc and gets invested back into the local economy. Money going back to Microsoft US is basically money down the drain from the point of view of Europe.
Similarly, replacing currently working computers with more powerful ones, purely to run vista - and with all the extra power being sucked up with the pretty effects - is the broken windows fallacy; i.e. money spent on new computers purely to run vista, with no other advantage is money that could have been spent on other areas instead. Also, most of the PC makers are not european, so the bulk of the money again goes out to the benefit of US and asian businesses, to the cost of europeans.
Finally, retraining and hiring lots of people to manage, maintain and use windows vista and office 12 (or whatever version it'll be) is only a benefit if they end up more productive at the end of it; if they are about as productive as they were on the old software, then the training costs are wasted money caused by being stuck on the windows treadmill. That money will go back into the local economy at least, but it could have been more productively spent on hiring people to expand the business and do new things, rather than just maintain the more complex infrastructure that nobody understands properly.
As the article says, european companies could quite happily spend the 40 billion on other things to grow their business, instead of spending it purely to stand still and get back to where they were but with slightly prettier graphics - something not particularly useful to business workers. If vista brings massive productivity benefits to people upgrading, fair enough - but that's not the reason they're talking about $40b, that's the money european businesses will need to spend (largely overseas) to get through it in one piece. Not a hugely compelling reason to upgrade, in my view.
I'd been using linux for several years before gentoo (caldera, redhat, mandrake), and I'd always dual-booted to windows with it - I just couldn't quite stick to linux as my primary desktop.
Gentoo changed that. I learned a lot about how to fix a system from gentoo. For a start, I learned about using a live-cd to chroot into a faulty install, and how to fix it - something I didn't realise you could do, with binary distros I just always gave up and reinstalled. I compiled my first kernel for gentoo, and realised it really isn't that scary - and you can really trim it down in size if you can read lspci.
Above all, I learned not to be scared of the command line, where to look for help, and that it's much quicker and nicer to fix a problem than the windows-learned habit of reinstalling at the first non-trivial problem. The binary distros don't really expose you to the underbelly of the OS, it's all point-and-click GUI cleanness. Creating your own RPMs is a giant pain in the ass. Updating an ebuild for a version bump that isn't in the portage tree yet? Damn easy. Gentoo is definitely a good system to learn more about linux on, simply because you have to in order to install the thing.
I introduced my fellow admin at work to linux through gentoo, on the basis he'd learn more about the underlying concepts of linux in 6 months of gentoo than several years of a windows-clone distro like ubuntu. Now he's running a mixture of SuSE and gentoo (we're both kde fans) pretty much unaided, and he's pretty happy maintaining the linux servers too.
The biggest mistake the article author made was giving up on the install at problems, and starting again from scratch. If he'd just left the machine compiling for long enough (how slow was his CPU anyway? I've had boxes fully compiled and running in a few hours), or kept at the GRP stage, he wouldn't have wasted so much time repeating himself.
My boxes at home are one gentoo server/desktop that's on 24/7 - even my other-half uses firefox on it; and one windows gaming pc that seems to break every third reboot, which is why I only turn it for a little gaming (company of heroes atm) every few days.
Nowadays, my linux boxes at work run a mixture of SuSE OSS and gentoo; SuSE for boxes that do basic file-serving/routing that I don't need to mess with, and gentoo for the systems that are doing clever or complex jobs like the smtp filtering gateway, because they're much easier to tweak 'just-so'.
Well yes, that's rather the point of taxation; money from everyone spent on the common good - at least in theory. Since not everyone wants to pay, you could spin it as being taken by force, but that's also slightly misleading, as most people accept the social contract and feel that a police service, roads, schools, hospitals etc are worth clubbing together to pay for - even allowing that some will get more than others, and some will not use a particular service at all.
Do you also feel that insurance is robbery, that paying in advance for a service you might not need is a waste of money? Government taxation is a form of compulsorary insurance.
As they touch on in the article, as more and more money is spent in the healthcare sector, the cost of insurance will continue to rise, and thus put even greater stress on what little social healthcare provision there is. As the people working in healthcare rises, the salary bill rises, and somebody has to pay it; and it'll either be government funding (research funding etc) and higher charges for the users.
Speaking as a non-american, it's already one of the great ironies of the 'great american economy' - increasing numbers of people will end up working in the healthcare industry, but won't be able to afford to use it for themselves or their families. Yet giving everyone affordable access to healthcare, increasing productivity, is decried as socialist, while letting people be crippled by the financial burden of a major illness is true-blue American. Lovely.
"Shunning" is such a silly word to use for this. Just because the iTunes store has not entirely replaced the CD in its few years of existence does not mean that users are shunning it.
Oh but it does. Digital downloads is such an improvement on CDs - or rather, it should be. It allows retailers to stock a much bigger range of music for little extra cost compared to warehouse scaling. That vast choice can then be offered to the customer. It allows a wide range of bitrates and codecs for little to no extra cost, so the customer can choose whether they want a low-rate mp3 for the mobile phone, a flac or dvd-audio for their monster home audio setup, or something in between. Ideally, what you pay is based on bandwidth used, so it's cheaper to download the lower-res files if you're on a tight budget.
Users can choose which tracks they want from which album - no longer do customers have to pay for half a dozen tracks they don't like - they can spend the money they save on more tracks they do like. Better musicians do better, poorer musicians relying on a one-track wonder won't, so the overall quality of music available will improve - but since it's digital distribution, even rubbish tracks will still sell a few, probably in 10 years time as 'nostalgia' pieces - and it doesn't matter, as server storage is cheap.
Digital distribution is much cheaper than physical distribution, so the cost of music can fall substantially with the artist still getting the same cut. Even better, the artists can distribute tracks themselves directly to the digital music stores, and cut out the middle man, thus getting a much bigger cut while the customer still gets cheaper music.
Digital distribution is also so cheap, it's not worth messing about with P2P for most people, so there's no DRM. DRM only means that paying users get a worse experience than illegal copiers anyway (as all DRM can be cracked easily), thus driving them to the P2P sites. DRM is thus actually counter-productive, as it harms the user experience of using the store - and one of the biggest advantages of digital distribution is that you can buy the track you want immediately, and not mess about driving to the shops or ordering from a giant warehouse, so ease of use is everything.
So - digital distribution is cheaper, more convenient, gives more money to the artist, has a much bigger range of tracks and choice in format. Its artifical restriction free, it plays on any device you like, you can redownload tracks you've already paid for and is much faster than any physical retailer.
I'm just waiting for the music industry and their supportive computing industry to actually DO this, rather than artificially hold back digital online stores to be worse than buying crappy plastic discs from a warehouse in surrey. People are shunning the digital stores because they're rubbish, not because CDs are inherently better than digital distribution.
silver surfers ???
It's a britishism referring to (the increasing number of) senior citizens who are using the internet - think hair colour...
I live near bournemouth (used to live there too, but shifted west a bit), and the thing that's annoyed people is the complete lack of information about the chips and the poor info about the new recycling scheme. Basically, they've been worried that the council is about to start spying on the amount of their rubbish disposal and charging an extra 'waste' tax based on how much they throw away. Given the the council tax is already supposed to pay for waste disposal, it's a bit cheeky to start charging extra, and people aren't happy to be secretly monitored by the council either.
Also, what about people throwing stuff in your bin? I live near a local market, and my non-wheelie bin constantly gets extra rubbish from people at the market. It's annoying bagging it up, it would be very very annoying if I was to be charged by weight for it to boot.
Personally, I wouldn't complain about the media too much - at least they're getting people involved in what their local council is up to, and if people get sufficiently up in arms over this, the council might be a bit more careful next time they decide to spend large sums of money secretly monitoring their residents.
These problems are the same as any small business has getting off the ground. How do I get new customers when they could just go to the big chains they already know?
The answers are the same. You take out loans to pay for marketing, promotions (giving stuff away free), and then pay them off when you're established and making a profit. You might even have to work two jobs to support yourself while you follow your dream and get established.
Not everybody makes it. Either they have a product that not enough people want, or people didn't find out about it, and they go under. That's the free market.
It's very little different to how artists work today. Unknown artists struggle to get exposure, so do bread-and-butter work and 2nd jobs to get by.
Giving away some of your work for free, especially digitally where it costs you virtually nothing, is great marketing. The 'tip-jar' method does work sometimes, as does getting people to pay for higher quality versions of your material. Give away the low-res one, maybe with adverts embedded (hellooooo, radio) and use that to get people to pay for the high-res version. After a few cycles of that, people will pay in advance for the new one to get it made, or released if already made.
The old method of charging many times what something cost to produce is dying. The whole point of the free market is for new businesses and new business methods to be tried out, and live or die in the attempt. DRM is the complete antithesis of the free market as it uses government law to prop up an artificial and failing business model, and removes the freedom of the customer to choose alternative providers. DRM on physical products warps the meaning of physical property itself for the purposes of the big media cartels.
My singlle player version of Half-life 2 DVD is a great example of the evils of DRM on physical media. It's encrypted, so I can't use it without Valve unlocking it for me online. I can't resell it, as my key is now used. I can't even give it away, as the key is tied to my steam account which has other older versions of my games in, and I can't delete the key or move it. The physical DVD in my hand might as well be a blank piece of plastic with a number printed on it, and to add insult to injury, when the game was first released I had to put my DVD in the drive for the DRM check, while people who'd bought it online didn't. It's over a year later, and I'm still pissed at Valve.
Those statistics are for the bbc homepage only, for one week in september 2005. He even states that he expects an above average number of people visiting the front page are newer-to-the-internet users (because they haven't bookmarked the inside section they want yet), and those on corporate systems as the bbc is deemed 'safe' to visit from work. This is based on their user profiling in the past.
Both of those would depress the number of alternative OS and browser users. You also have to factor in the number of linux users that have already altered their Useragent string to windows+IE in order to bypass moronic page restrictions like the NYT. Windows+IE native users of course, have very little need to alter theirs.
Finally, that was a year ago. Vista still isn't out, and I wouldn't be at all surprised if both the numbers for OSX and linux were up, and of course firefox adoption - especially given an increasing number of corporates are adopting it for security. Certainly, the broad sweep of those figures is reasonable (I wouldn't expect linux use to be above 2% in those circumstances) but I wouldn't count on them as completely gospel of the current OS and browser useage for general users.
They are addressing the issue of power draw; take the nvidia 7600gt/gs, it doesn't even need a separate molex connector, it gets all its power from the pci-e bus. The thing about feature sets is, you want one thing (a low wattage card, with less cutting edge performance) and _I_ want a card that pushes polygons as fast as possible, and hang the power-use; that's why there is more than one card in a range.
Also, as new chips come out, the old ones are retired, but not immediately. So the question often is do I want the cheap end of the new range, or the expensive end of the old range, thus leading to more choice/confusion (the expensive end of the new chipsets is just silly money). There's no way out of that short of killing supply of the old cards immediately, which is quite annoying if you were planning on getting one when they got older and cheaper as part of an SLI/crossfire setup.
Oh, and btw - do you still have a 5 1/4" floppy disc and a VLB slot? Technology moves on. AGP simply doesn't have enough bandwidth for the newer GPU's. PCI-E is SO much more flexible and has a lot of headroom. I'd advise doing the whole upgrade in one go though; DDR2, PCI-E and M2 or conroe-compatible 775. If you're happy with your current performance on your current hardware, fair enough, but try playing games like oblivion, FEAR, or upcoming games like UT2007. Still, the longer you can bear it, the more you'll get for your money when you do finally bite the bullet.
The nv drivers are the open-source reverse engineered ones that come with Xorg. They don't have access to most of the specs of the cards, and have to do 3D in software. Basically, they're bearable for 2D work, but since Nvidia don't disclose most of the info needed to write proper drivers (NDA's and all that) the only choice for high-speed use is still the binary closed source nvidia driver.
There are questions over whether the GPL prevents the distribution of the closed-source binary driver precompiled for use with a particular distro's kernel; which is why most distro's have now switched to the GPL Xorg nv driver by default, and let you 'taint' the kernel with the binary driver yourself if you wish, which is definitely legal. For the ramifications of this sorry state of affairs - where convenience butts heads with principles - see what happened to koraa
The situation is very similar for ATI cards.
The real answer is to buy music from independants, music on labels that aren't part of the RIAA, and don't condone the mafia-like tactics of the major labels.
If artists can see that selling music through places like cdbaby is a route for success and profit, rather than signing a devil's contract with a major - then the supply of new artists ready to be screwed by the majors will dry up. That will, in turn, hurt the majors which might just start to adjust their instructions to the RIAA lawyers - or at best, they'll go out of business.
Don't stop buying music. Just stop buying music from the labels determined to destroy fair use and keep price-fixing. Artists will get the message eventually if we, their customers, give them a good alternative.
Just as evidence, look at the ROKSO list - almost all Americans.
Yes, but it's almost entirely a few American spammers sending spam advertising crap products to Americans, priced in dollars and shipping in the US. The rest is made up of nigerian scammers and phishers, but those are already illegal under fraud laws.
The mail might route via asian open hosts, but the problem is largely American. Anything that affects US spammers would have a huge impact on world spam. Mind you, the Russians are getting in on the act, so they'll need to tackled head on as well in an ideal world.
I agree with you about the 'last host' problem though, the ISPs would end up carrying the bulk of the costs. Still, might shut down pink ticket ISP's for good, as they'd have to levy the fine upwards on their customers. Still, it smacks of breaching common carrier, which is tricky.
Better to just fine the seller of the goods. After all, they have a website, it's linked in the email, and it's selling a product (porn, drugs etc etc) in a manner against the law.
What licence? They sold me the software via a reseller, with no requirement to read, agree, or sign anything from microsoft prior to the purchase.
Once the product is delivered, there are nice pretty stickers saying I have to agree to a licence before I use the product. But what licence? It's my box, my CD, and my copy of Windows. First Sale doctrine says that once they've sold me a copy of a copyrighted work, that copy is mine and they cannot use copyright law to apply any further terms to my use of said copy POST SALE. That sticker is now my sticker, my receipt says so, so they can stuff their OEM terms wherever they like.
You could argue that I need to agree to the licence in order to use windows update and activation, (i.e. an ongoing relationship), but I don't recall any notice to that effect when you activate. Nor should an artificial technical restriction to get round first sale doctrine stand up well in court.
This troll is posted in every GPL discussion, and most linux discussions. Ignore it, it's complete crap intended merely to provoke responses.